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I don’t usually divulge some of the more gray hat techniques I use to get traffic and build links, but I messed up this one and through trial and error it seems to be perfected, so I thought I’d share it. It is based on Collin Lahay’s Link Building With Flickr technique and this one takes the process just on step further getting you links on pages with a PR of 3, 4 and even a few with a PR of 5. Flickr has recently implemented the dreaded “no-follow” tag, but I am still getting links in Google using this technique as show below for one of my blogs:

If you don’t have a Flickr account it’s easy to sign up for one at Flickr.com. You will actually need a Yahoo account (the same as a Yahoo email address) first and then you sign into Flickr and create your account in about 10 seconds.

The nice thing about Flickr is that it lets you leave comments on other people’s photos and what you may not know, is that you can put some basic html in your comments. That basic html allows you to even place an anchor text link. See how this is getting better?

Now, Collin’s technique in a great one because he shows you how to find Flickr pages that will potentially have hundreds or maybe even thousands of links coming in to them. These links will be from people who found the photo through Digg because it reached the front page and had maybe ten of thousands of visitors, consequently people will link to that photo. Eventually these Flickr pages will rank high and get some good PR because of all the links coming in. You can learn how to find those photos by reading more on Collin’s link build technique.

But what if you want to find pages at Flickr that have high PR already? After using Collin’s technique I started thinking about that and it hit me like a ton of bricks how simple it would be to do. And it gets even better because these pages may give you a relevancy benefit in the search engines as well. (I don’t know this for sure, it’s just an educated guess) Even if you don’t get a relevancy benefit, at least your comments will be relevant to the picture with what I’m going to show you.

How do you find hi PR photo pages on Flickr? It’s simple, you just use the site: command the www.flickr.com url and a keyword. For example, if you had a site about cats and wanted to find high PR photo pages in Flickr about cats, you just plug this into Google: site:www.flickr.com cat . It’s that easy. Then what you want to look for is a search result that says, “on Flickr – Photo Sharing!” at the end of the title. These are the only results that are individual photos rather than groups of photos, a photographer’s page, discussion groups, etc. You may have to click over to a few of these kind of results before you find one with PR. you do all this while you are logged into your Flickr account and there will be a box at the bottom of all the comments for you to leave yours.

A Word Of Warning

As I said at the beginning, I messed this one up, and yes I did it good. I’ve had 2 Flickr accounts banned because I got a little overzealous and posted a few too many links. I always leave comments relevant to the photo I’ve located, but leaving too many seems to be grounds for banning. No big deal, just go get yourself a new Yahoo ID and a new Flickr account and you are good to go. I now make sure I create a Yahoo ID strictly for a Flickr account and do not use the Yahoo ID for any important email because if it gets banned, Yahoo takes away your ID as well. I also limit my comments to 6 or 7 a day and open a new account after leaving around 40 to 50 comments

I don’t know how much longer this will work, but it still seems to be working even after the “nofollow” tag implementation. I just put up 3 or 4 links today and I’ll report back in a couple of weeks to see if I get a backlink in Google.

There used to be a day when I received lots of traffic from Technorati, but that’s nearly a year in the past. When I kept up with my American Idol News blog, there would be some months it would receive around 3,000 visitors and some single days it would get more than 500 visitors from Technorati alone.

I haven’t seen anything but a trickle of traffic from Technorati or much benefit from tagging my posts with Affiliate Confession at all, even though I have an authority of 139, 17 fans and a rank of 44,842. In fact, what completely puzzles me is that Technorati won’t even index my tags with all that authority and being that this blog is almost 4 months old. It could have something to do with the age of Affiliate Confession, but I’m not sure about that. If anyone has any insight, please leave a comment.

If I post at the above mentioned Idol blog, the Technorati tags still get indexed almost immediately or within a few minutes. I no longer keep up with the AI blog because it took too much time and wasn’t producing any revenue to speak of. However, it did produce quite a good flow of traffic from Technorati. The secret was to blog about something on the Technorati top 10 tags list, when it used to be right on the front page, and when American Idol got around to the top 12 usually one or more of the Idols were on the Technorati top tag list. I would write a post and get 100 to 300 visitors from Technorati within 30 minutes of publishing it. (I’ve hardly watched the show at all this year)

The big mystery is that the American Idol blog has almost no authority, no fans and a horrible rank, yet the posts with tags get indexed in minutes. If you compare the American Idol blog at Technorati with Affiliate Confession, it make no sense whatsoever. Affiliate Confession should be getting tons of traffic from Technorati, but it gets less than 5 visitors a day. What does Technorati want before they start indexing tags from a blog? Did they change their rules when I wasn’t looking? If Affiliate Confession doesn’t have enough authority to get tags indexed at Technorati what blog does?

All this brings me back to the original question, is Technorati broken or just lame?

Article marketing is one of the fastest ways I’ve found to get a new site indexed and traffic coming to it almost immediately. With the techniques I’ll describe in this post, I’ve seen most of my brand new sites get indexed in Google in about 3 days and have organic keyword traffic coming to those sites in about 10 days from the time the article is published.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do article marketing and one of the most important aspects of it aren’t followed by even the best writers. I’ve read articles by Doctors, Lawyers and Indian Chiefs or similar professionals and if they adhered to one simple principle, it would probably make a huge difference in their traffic and rankings. And this principle has absolutely nothing to do with your writing ability.

I’ll get to this super secret technique in a minute, but first, let’s talk about what an article that you submit to an article directory is. An article has nothing to do with the specific site you’re trying to promote. When writing an article, think about your subject, not your site. An article should never be written to tell your audience how terrific your site is and how they should visit it because you are the super guru in your specialized field. Never sell your site when writing an article.

The purpose of writing an article is threefold, one, to give the reader some general information on a subject, secondly, to position yourself as an expert in your field, without selling, and thirdly, to get links back to your site from authority sites and hopefully more sites as other webmasters pick up your article to used as content on their site.

For a good article example, let’s say you have a travel site on San Francisco and on it you talk about great places to eat, places to visit, museums to see, places to shop, etc., and you have the site filled with Adsense and TripAdvisor links to all the top hotels and B & B’s. When you write and article you don’t want to describe pages on your site and try to sell the fact that you site is the place to go to find the best rates on hotels and places to stay.

What you want to write about is maybe the history of San Francisco and the nostalgia of cable cars, or maybe about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge or possibly the history of Alcatraz and how only one person in the history of the prison escaped from it. You then want to place links to your site in the writer’s box at the bottom of the article.

So what’s the big secret to article writing that most people miss? It is in how you place those links in your writer’s box. Most article directories will let you place up to 3 live links at the bottom of your article and some will even let you place links in the body of the article as well. The biggest mistake I see writers make is in not using all 3 links and not using anchor text to link back to their web site. They instead just use a simple url as a link and while this will get you a link back to your site, it will not give you the full SEO benefits of having a keyword link instead. It’s not really a super secret technique, it’s just being smart about your article marketing.

The three article directories I use that give me the quickest results are:

EzineArticles.com– This is the best of the best in article directories. It is a PR 6 article directory and somehow your articles are immediately ranked as a PR 6 page getting you the benefit of a quality keyword link to your site. Once your article is approved, your site is usually spidered and indexed in about 3 days to 1 week. Until you write 20 articles it may take up to 5 days to get your article approved.

GoArticles.com – I like this directory because you can place links in the body of your articles and it is one of the only top directories that will let you do this.

ArticleBlast.com – The reason I like this directory is because your article needs no approval process except that you are a member of the site. Your articles are published to the site immediately and will appear on the front page under your chosen category within 5 minutes of publishing it. You can’t get publicity any quicker than that.

My normal process for getting a site indexed quickly is to write an article and submit it to all three of these directories the same day. Some would suggest to change each article around a bit to avoid duplicate content issues between directories, but I’ve personally never done that and haven’t had any problems with this technique being a big benefit to my sites.

Now get to work on writing a few articles and see if you don’t find out the benefits.

I haven’t been keeping up with answering comments or responding to email much in the last few days as Jean and I took a much needed break and stayed at the Garden Cottage in Mt Dora, FL for a couple of days. However, I used the time stamp feature of WordPress and wrote 3 posts ahead to cover for the time we were gone.

Affiliate Confession has now been blogged for more than 30 consecutive days and I’ve seen some pretty good results for the effort. Being that the 30 days ended right in the middle of the Christmas holidays there is probably a significant drop in traffic from people not being on their computers. (I shouldn’t be either) But there is now a very good base of posts, rss readers and links coming in to start off the New Year on a good pace.

During the last 30 days ending Dec 21st, Affiliate Confession has gone from 5 visitors a day to a high of 620 in a day and back down to 106 visitors on the last day of the 30 day effort on Friday, Dec 21st. The average per day over the entire 30 day period was 130 visitors. The most traffic came from StumbleUpon and the second most came from Entrecard. A total of 3,906 visitors came to Affiliate Confession during that time and visited 7,581 pages. The blog also gained a total of 45 rss readers, which I am vary thankful for those who have signed up.

I would consider this 30 writing challenge to be a success and although Affiliate Confession isn’t getting much traffic from Google, there is now a solid base of content for Google to index and rank and I’m expecting to see a big change in SE traffic in the month of January.

I want to personally thank each and every reader of this blog for taking the time out to read what I have to say. That’s a very humbling thing to think that readers are even looking to this blog at all for advice. I will try my best not do disappoint you.

Thanks again for reading and I hope you and your family have a very Merry Christmas!

Related posts you might be interested in:

I’ve blogged a couple of times about the benefits of EntreCard and how you can get some pretty decent traffic from it, but now Sam at Sam’s Freedom has taken the whole EntreCard thing a huge step forward and has started The First Entrecard Meme Know To Bloggers.

The premise behind it is to get even more traffic to your blog than you would through Entrecard and to get and receive a few links and maybe a one sentence review in the process. So how does this whole thing work? Read below:

Here Are The Simple Entrecard Meme Instructions

Read these instructions twice so you completely understand them;

Drop your EntreCard at this site;

Drop your EntreCard at the 5 EntreCard users’ sites listed below;

Choose 5 other EntreCard users;

Copy these instructions to your own Entrecard meme article and tag (link) those 5 people;

Include a link to the Entrecard meme article of the person who tagged you;

5. knupNet – Lots of short and to the point posts on news and how to make money in affiliate marketing.

There you go! Now get out and see what these blogs are all about and drop your Entrecard. Remember, you aren’t going to be a good blogger and affiliate marketer if you aren’t reading about what other bloggers are doing.